Reviled at birth, the Free Speech Movement is returning under a crown of glory to its UC Berkeley home this week.

More than 50 events are being held to mark the movement's 40th anniversary, including an echo of the captive police-car episode. The week's highlight will be a noon rally Friday atop a police car in Sproul Plaza with former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean among the speakers.

No one knew at the time that the 1964 campus conflict would be viewed, much less honored, today as the political earthquake that spawned a generation of student protests across the nation.

The 10 weeks that shook the world began Oct. 1 when students sat down in civil disobedience and blocked a police car on Sproul Plaza that was attempting to take away civil rights organizer Jack Weinberg, a former Cal grad student who had been arrested for violating a campus ban on political advocacy.

Weinberg, who coined the phrase "Don't trust anyone over 30," was a campus leader for the Congress on Racial Equality, which played a role in the 1964 Freedom Summer of civil rights activism in the South.

Among those who took off their shoes before climbing on top of the car to address the crowd of protesters that swelled to 3,000 during the ensuing 32- hour standoff was a 21-year-old philosophy student named Mario Savio, whose eloquence quickly propelled him to the role of movement spokesman.

Savio's words from the Sproul steps two months later have been branded into the annals of American student protests:

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop."

The FSM represented not just an extension of the civil rights movement and a fight for free speech on campus but also "an outlet for the feelings of hostility and alienation which so many students have toward the university," Weinberg wrote at the time.

On one level, the fight was over the ban on political advocacy that ironically had been formulated in 1934 by the man after whom Sproul Plaza is named, former UC President Robert Gordon Sproul, to thwart Communist influence on campus.

But at the same time, Savio and many protesters targeted then-UC President Clark Kerr's vision of a "multiversity" that serves the knowledge industry. They saw a student-as-product academic factory meant not to foster knowledge but to provide trained labor for the corporate-military-imperialist complex.

By the time 800 students were arrested Dec. 3 for occupying Sproul Hall - - the largest mass arrest of students in U.S. history -- the FSM had been cast by university officials and the press as a danger to society.

Savio was jailed and kicked out of school. Kerr said the demonstrators included "persons identified as being sympathetic with the Communist Party and Communist causes."

"Contempt Leads to Anarchy on the Berkeley Campus," said a Chronicle editorial on the FSM.

Today, the FSM enjoys appreciative news coverage and a warm embrace from UC.

"Happy 40th Birthday to the Free Speech Movement," declared one of several campus announcements on the anniversary events.

"Most sections of the campus are very proud of that part of our history," said Dean of Students Karen Kenney.

Signs of Cal's pride began in 1997, a year after Savio's death, when the campus named the steps in front of Sproul Hall as the "Mario Savio Steps." In 1998, the Bancroft Library began a Free Speech Movement project and archive, and soon afterward the campus opened a Free Speech Movement Café that doubles as an FSM history gallery.

UC is even pleased to provide a police car for Friday's rally, although it will be an 8-year-old, unmarked vehicle "in case the car gets damaged," said campus police Lt. Pat Carroll. The police are installing a red spotlight on the 1996 Ford Crown Victoria, like the one on the Ford sedan that held Weinberg in 1964, Carroll said.

Asked why the FSM changed from pariah to icon, Cohen said UC officials in 1964 had had a "more constricted view of campus free speech rights" conditioned by the Red Scares of the '30s and '50s and a fear that campus leniency with radical activism would jeopardize state funding.

"In hindsight," he said, "it is easier for UC officials to look at the FSM more calmly and to see that it was at its heart a democratic movement championing free speech."

The chief organizer of this week's commemoration, FSM veteran Michael Rossman of Berkeley, said the embrace of the FSM by the UC Berkeley administration today "is sincerely meant but somewhat superficial."

Rossman said the campus still opposed some forms of student activism, such as "the 40-year struggle of the graduate student instructors to win union recognition."

Rossman stressed that this week's events -- sponsored jointly by the FSM veterans, campus administration and the student government -- were meant primarily to focus on today's struggles with civil rights and secondarily on FSM history and influence.

"The central broad issue is the endangered state of civil liberties in our time," he said.

Among the issues expected to animate this week's events is the continuing debate over the FSM's main legacy.

"The FSM's chief impact," said Columbia University Professor Todd Gitlin, a leader in the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) in the '60s, "was to ignite a sensibility of mass student protest, which, when the Vietnam War accelerated shortly afterward, was ready to turn toward this new danger to moral politics."

UC Berkeley history Professor Richard Abrams, an assistant professor on campus in 1964, said he agreed with faculty criticism in 1964 of the chancellor and support of political discourse on campus, but he said he viewed the FSM's "scornful and sarcastic and contemptuous" attack on the campus administration as a "terrible abuse of civil disobedience as a technique."

"It had a terrible backlash, and we're still suffering from that," he said. "The most immediate example was the election of Ronald Reagan (as governor) in 1966."

Reagan, who promised to clean up "that mess in Berkeley," defeated popular incumbent Pat Brown and quickly engineered the firing of the liberal Kerr, whom Reagan viewed as too soft on the protesters.

For Rossman, the FSM triggered "the nation's first mass movement against the Vietnam War and an affirmative action movement" on campuses. It also paved the way for other movements ranging from educational reform to rights for women and the handicapped, he said.

The Free Speech Movement, he said, was "a major revolution in our concepts of politics and political practice, which we're still trying to sort out."

FREE-SPEECH WEEK

This week's 40th anniversary commemoration of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley includes more than 50 events running through Sunday. A full schedule is available at www.fsm-a.org/#conflict.

The main event will be a rally at noon Friday around a police car in Sproul Plaza. Speakers include Howard Dean; UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau; California Assemblywoman and FSM member Jackie Goldberg; Bettina Aptheker, chairwoman of the UC Santa Cruz women's studies department and FSM veteran; student-body President Misha Leybovich, and others. Some of them will speak from the roof of the car.